this discussion, i'll just tell you one very personal anecdote. three days before the sandy hook shooting, i was in denver, colorado, on personal business. and i was driving through the denver suburbs, and i passed into aurora rah, colorado, and saw the sign and thought to myself -- as journalists often do -- oh, my god, this just disappeared from our landscape. it happened not that long ago in which a young man, now appears to be utterly deranged, b went into a movie theater and began shooting down people with an assault weapon. and it went away. the not part of the presidential debate, it was not part of the fabric of our lives, it was not part of the daily journalistic diet. so on that wednesday night i e-mailed the producer of the "meet the press" show that was coming up on that sunday in which they would be talking about big ideas that america needs to be thinking about. and i said you should put shooting at the top of the list. we have been through aurora, the sikh temple, the oregon shopping mall, think about this, this is before we got to sandy hook. in newtown. we'd had a time of ab
